Climate Letter #1763

Where does high-altitude water vapor come from, and how much is there? I want to pin this information down more accurately than I have in the past, and think I have found the right way to do so. The Weather Maps do not hold the answer because they lump all “precipitable water” into one snapshot, no matter where it exists from the surface on up. The high-altitude fraction is no more than a small part of the total. First of all we need to find the best earmarks of identify, in order to clearly separate it from the rest, and then we can proceed to describe its unusual patterns of behavior.

Identification is best accomplished by utilizing the animated version of precipitable water, as produced by a department associated with the University of Wisconsin and found at this website:  http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/mtpw2/product.php. Note that the current improved version was only created a little over two years ago and may not yet have found its way into the repertoire of everyone who could benefit from using it. I’m finding a new use for this remarkable tool almost every day, and only regret the lack of any way to reproduce its imagery for illustration purposes.

So how should we identify high-altitude water vapor? Formation into discrete steams is an important feature, but not totally unique. Its streams will always be in motion, and the speed and direction of motion is a good marker since there is always an eastward and poleward slant to begin with. Every stream will then try to sustain that course no matter how many various and often frequent interruptions come into play. Individual streams start shrinking fairly quickly and generally last for less than ten days before breaking up and spreading out widely with whatever vapor remains at that point.

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These streams always originate out on the periphery of the line holding the main body of precipitable water.  Right now the line is centered at about ten degrees north of the equator, and most stream formation begins another twenty or so degrees farther out to either side, presumably limited to places where surface water has a necessary degree of warmth for proper updrafting and skies are not too clouded.  Respiration from the trees of major rainforests serves about as well as ocean water as a source. If I had to guess I’d say that less than 10% of all vapor produced in the tropics ends up in one of these streams, possibly more like 5%.  Most of the remaining bulk of evaporation doesn’t move as far, and when it does the direction seems to be more to the west than east.  Bulk vapors also show little sign of interaction with jetstream winds before condensing and raining out for the simple reason that few such winds frequent the airways over the tropical zone. 

Today I can see five vapor streams active in the Southern Hemisphere, and they are all quite skinny. They tend to burn out by the time they reach latitude 50S and from there have relatively few leftover remnants of vapor to dispatch into the polar zone. In the north the number of streams is no greater but they are much broader and clearly carry far greater quantities of vapor. At least five and maybe ten times as much vapor ends up inside the polar zone in comparison with the south, mainly for seasonal reasons that will soon be changing. You should be able to see small parcels as high as 20-25kg in spots inside the polar zone, while around 15kg of totally diffused vapor is fairly common. We are left wondering happens to it once it gets there, and the long journey has ended.

Carl

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